Many car owner manuals require longer reading times than some of popular works of fiction, being longer than the likes of the Da Vinci Code, says new research from Scrap Car Comparison, a UK-based comparison website for scrap vehicle prices, which studied 90  manuals for the most popular vehicles.

The research, which took word counts from each manual and used the average English silent reading speed of 238 words per minute to reach the results, found that the flash Audi R8 has the longest owner's manual, requiring an eye-watering 43 hours to read - lengthier than the entirety of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series!

The study analysed 90 vehicle owner’s manuals, to reveal the word count and readability of each document, as well as calculating how long it would take to read each one, based on an average reading time of 238 words per minute. The research also compared this with analysis of some of the world’s most well-loved fictional titles, including War and Peace, The Lord of The Rings series, and The Da Vinci Code. 

The 10 vehicle manuals which require the most time to read

The longest vehicle manual according to the analysis was from the Audi R8, which contains 616,064 words spread over 308 pages, equating to 43 hours and 9 minutes of reading time. When compared to popular fictional texts, the Audi R8 manual is over 28,000 words and 2 hours of reading longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and requires just under three hours more reading-time the entire Lord of The Rings book series, the analysis found. 

The research revealed that the average manual length stands at 109,106 words long, meaning the Audi R8 manual is nearly 6 times longer, with the manual of the Audi e-tron following very closely behind in second position with 603,649 words cover to cover. Audi featured four times in the top 20 longest manuals, with the R8, e-tron, A3 and Q2 each having above-average reading times of over 10 hours.

The 10 vehicle manuals which require the shortest time to read

Electric scooter Vmoto Super Soco CPX is the vehicle with the shortest owner’s manual, taking just 11 minutes to read, with only 2,834 words, the report said, noting that the Honda NSC 110 Vision and Honda VB125F motorcycles follow to make up the top three vehicles with the most succinct manuals, taking around an hour each to read.  

Honda motorcycles rank four times in the top ten, each with manuals of under 23,500 words - taking less than two hours to read. Only three of the top ten vehicles were cars (rather than motorbikes) with the Range Rover Evoque, Nissan Leaf and VW Polo all having particularly punchy manuals to read through, the report said.  

The 10 vehicle manuals which are the most difficult to read

In addition to reading-length, the Scrap Car Comparison study also used the renowned Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Score to rank the how accessible each of these popular vehicle manuals are.

Finding that the manual of the McLaren 765LT supercar is the most difficult to digest, with a score of 44.3, you would need the equivalent of a college-level education to understand the text. The Vauxhall Crossland X, BMW 2 Series, Ferrari 812 Superfast and Vauxhall Grandland X follow to make up the top five most difficult manuals to read, according to the report.

Each of the manuals in the top ten were deemed to be at a university-level (aged 18+) of complexity to read, meaning they’d be more difficult to read than Moby Dick, which has a reading level equivalent to 8th or 9th grade, the report said.

The 10 vehicle manuals which are the easiest to read

It was the Model Y from automotive and technology giant Tesla which ranked as the easiest vehicle manual to understand. Scoring 76.92 on the Flesch Reading Ease Score, the manual for the EV is suitable for those in 7th grade (aged 12-13 years old) to read, and is no more complex than Twilight or The Great Gatsby to grasp, the analysis found.  

Two Toyota models (Tacoma and Tundra), the Chevrolet Bolt EV, and popular first car of choice, the Fiat 500 ranked in the top five, all with scores of over 73 indicating their simplicity to understand, according to research by Scrap  Car Comparison.